William Pitt, the Younger

William Pitt, the Younger, (born May 28, 1759, Hayes, Kent, England—died January 23, 1806, London), British prime minister (1783–1801, 1804–06) during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. He had considerable influence in strengthening the office of the prime minister.

Early life

William Pitt was the second son of William Pitt, 1st earl of Chatham, a famous statesman of the mid-18th century, whose energy contributed much to Britain’s successful prosecution of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) with France. His mother was Lady Hester Grenville, sister of George Grenville (who headed the government from 1763 to 1765). Both because he was extremely delicate and because his father disliked public schools, he was educated at home. He was a precocious boy and went to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, at the age of 14. Because of persistent ill health, he made use in 1776 of the antiquated privilege that allowed noblemen’s sons to graduate without examination. Left, after his father’s death in 1778, with an income of less than £300 a year, he was called to the bar in 1780 and joined the western assize circuit. In September 1780, because of his youth, he failed to secure election to Parliament for Cambridge University but four months later was provided with a seat for Appleby in Westmorland, on condition that he should resign it should his views and those of his patron diverge. Pitt made a successful maiden speech and, in March 1782, when it was clear that a new ministry would soon be formed, announced with astonishing self-confidence that he had no intention of accepting a subordinate position.

Under Lord Shelburne, who succeeded as prime minister in July 1782, Pitt became chancellor of the Exchequer. With Shelburne’s consent, Pitt, in February 1783, sought a compact with Charles James Fox, who had gone into opposition, but Fox absolutely refused to serve under Shelburne. According to his contemporary biographer, his form tutor and friend George Tomline, Pitt then replied that he had not come there to betray Lord Shelburne. This interview marked the beginning of the long political duel between Pitt and Fox and also rapidly brought to an end Shelburne’s ministry, since Fox now surprisingly allied himself with Lord North, a politician who had always been willing to work in accordance with the King’s wishes, and defeated Shelburne. King George III, unwilling to accept the coalition that would give office to Fox, whom he hated, invited Pitt to form a government; but Pitt declined, knowing he would not have a majority in the House of Commons, and the King had to commission Fox and North. To embarrass the new government, which, under the nominal premiership of the Duke of Portland, consisted of an admixture of reformers and anti-reformers, Pitt brought forward the question of parliamentary reform, with which he had already once, a year earlier, concerned himself. He suggested no extension of the franchise but recommended measures to prevent bribery and to make the representation more realistic. Although his resolutions were defeated, reformers now looked to him, rather than to Fox, as their parliamentary leader.

Pitt’s first ministry, 1783–1801

In December 1783, after the defeat in the House of Lords of Fox’s East India Bill, George III at once took the opportunity to dismiss the coalition and asked Pitt to form a government. Pitt clearly did not take the premiership as the King’s tool, for his first step was to try, on his own terms, to include Fox and his friends in the new ministry. But Fox would not consent to join a government from which his ally Lord North would have been excluded.

When Parliament reassembled in January 1784, the government was at once defeated by 39 votes on a virtual motion of censure, but Pitt refused to resign, and George III was prepared to abdicate rather than again surrender to the Fox–North coalition. Pitt admitted that his situation was without precedent but denied that he was prime minister through backstairs influence. He hung on, and gradually the coalition’s majority in Parliament began to crumble; many members, fearing the loss of their seats at a general election, went over to Pitt’s side during February and March, doubtless in the hope that he would gain a majority in the existing house sufficient to make a dissolution unnecessary. By March 8 the majority against him was one vote, and on March 25 Parliament was dissolved.

No 18th-century government lost a general election, and Pitt’s success in 1784 was never in doubt. The “influence of the Crown” ensured that the new House of Commons was chosen by the Treasury. Patronage and corruption gave Pitt a majority, and secret service money paid election bills. Although public opinion aided Pitt in the open constituencies, it is nevertheless misleading to say that he was “the choice of the people”; he was the dispenser of royal patronage. Pitt himself was returned for the University of Cambridge; only once again (1790), at subsequent elections, did he have to stand a contest.

When Pitt became prime minister, the national credit was impaired by the heavy cost of the American Revolution. The debt was about £250,000,000, a staggering amount for those days. Pitt imposed new taxes to wipe out the deficit, checked smuggling by reducing the high duties that encouraged it, and reduced frauds in the revenue by establishing an improved system of auditing. He also simplified customs and excise duties, bringing them into a single consolidated fund, out of which all public creditors were to be paid. In 1786 he introduced a sinking fund on a new principle: an annual surplus of £1,000,000 was to be appropriated to the purchase of stock and allowed to accumulate at compound interest for 28 years, by which time the income from it would amount to £4,000,000 a year. In 1792 another act provided that a sinking fund of 1 percent should be attached to every new loan, which would thereby be redeemed within 45 years. The system worked reasonably well in peacetime because there was an annual surplus of revenue, but, after the outbreak of war in 1793, the government redeemed debt bearing a low interest by fresh borrowing at a higher rate of interest.

Fox’s East India Bill had been defeated, but the problems it was designed to solve remained. Britain’s increased possessions in India made it necessary for the administration there to be supervised by the government rather than be left in the hands of the commercial East India Company. Pitt, therefore, introduced his own East India bill (1784). He set up a new government department, the Board of Control, to supervise the directors of the company. He also ended an inappropriate division of authority in India by making the governor general supreme over the subordinate governments of Bombay and Madras. In 1786 a supplementary act increased the authority of the governor general over his own council. Warren Hastings, governor general of Bengal since 1773, returned home in 1785, having greatly strengthened British power in India, only to undergo the ordeal of an impeachment for his conduct. Pitt honestly believed that there was a case against Hastings and, determined that the British name should be freed from the suspicion of injustice or oppression in the government of Asian peoples, supported the demand for an inquiry. But those who conducted the impeachment acted with unwarrantable rancour; the trial dragged on for seven years and, although Hastings was finally acquitted, the expenses almost ruined him.

Another imperial problem with which Pitt had to deal was that of the future of Canada. By the Constitutional Act of 1791 the then province of Quebec was divided into a predominantly French province of Lower Canada and a predominantly English province of Upper Canada. Pitt, who was in office when men were first transported to Australia, never regarded that country as anything more than a convict settlement.

Pitt’s foreign policy was only moderately successful. In 1788 he made alliances with Prussia and with Holland, aimed at restricting French influence. But, in effect, the alliance served only one useful purpose: Prussia’s diplomatic support enabled Pitt in 1790 to triumph over the Spanish without having to go to war in the Nootka Sound dispute. Thus, the Spanish claim to a monopoly of trade and settlement on the western seaboard of North America was finally destroyed. Pitt’s intervention in eastern Europe, however, bore no such marks of triumph. Catherine II of Russia was bent on establishing her supremacy in the Black Sea. In March 1791 Pitt sent her an ultimatum demanding the restoration to the Sultan of all conquests except Crimea. But his policy of bolstering up the Turkish Empire was supported neither by the entire Cabinet nor by public opinion, and the government, badly shaken, had to reverse its policy.

Although the British government clung to neutrality as long as possible, in face of the European wars started by the leaders of the French Revolution, war proved unavoidable. It was not the execution of the French king Louis XVI in January 1793 that made a continuation of peace impossible but it was the provocative French decrees of late 1792, which authorized their armies to violate neutral territory and which promised military assistance to any European people wishing to depose its rulers. The French, confident of victory after their successes against the Austro-Prussian forces and believing that England was ripe for revolution, declared war on England and Holland on February 1, 1793. Pitt refused to intervene to restore the French monarchy. He fought to protect Britain’s vital commercial and colonial interests.

The French Revolution had revived the agitation for parliamentary reform, dormant since a bill introduced by Pitt in 1785 had been defeated, but the cause of reform was soon discredited because its advocates were thought to approve of the violence in France. The unwise demonstrations of the radicals caused the government to have recourse to repressive legislation. In May 1792 a proclamation against seditious publications was issued; and the Habeas Corpus Act, which normally prevented the detention of persons without trial, was suspended in 1794 and remained so until 1801.

The French Revolution had disastrous repercussions in Ireland, too, creating new hatreds to exacerbate the old religious feuds and a rebellion in 1798. As early as 1792 Pitt had held that an ultimate union of the two countries was the only solution of the Irish religious problem; the events of 1798 convinced him that union was most urgently necessary. Large-scale corruption carried the measure through the Irish Parliament, but opposition from Pitt’s Cabinet and particularly from the King prevented him from carrying his supplementary proposals—Catholic emancipation and state provision for Catholic and Dissenting clergy. As a result, Pitt resigned on February 3, 1801, and his friend Henry Addington formed a government. The crisis again drove the King insane, and after his recovery in March he accused Pitt of having caused his illness. Pitt replied that he would never again press the Catholic question during the King’s reign.

Patriotic motives induced Pitt to support the new ministry, but for several months during the session of 1802–03 he never attended Parliament, living in Walmer Castle, where, holding the ancient office of warden of the Cinque Ports, he organized a local volunteer force. In March 1803 Addington invited Pitt to join the government, but Pitt made it clear that he would return only as prime minister. War broke out again in May 1803, and by 1804 Pitt was increasingly critical of the government’s financial polity and its measures to meet the growing danger of invasion. Addington’s majority fell steadily, and he decided to resign. On April 30 Pitt was informed that the King wished him to plan a new ministry. Pitt replied that a nonparty government was desirable but fell in with the King’s determination that Fox be excluded.

Pitt’s second ministry, 1804–06

Pitt’s second ministry was weaker than the first, for the Addington group, as well as others, went into opposition. The Third Coalition against Napoleon’s France—an alliance with Russia, Sweden, and Austria engineered by Pitt—collapsed after the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805, and the year closed in disaster, in spite of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October, which ended the invasion threat and ensured Britain’s naval supremacy for the rest of the war. Pitt’s health, never robust, was now failing. He made his last public speech at the Guildhall in London on November 9, 1805. By January 15, 1806, some of his colleagues were determined to force him to resign as the only means of saving his life, and the King was thinking about his successor. He died a few weeks later and was buried in Westminster Abbey on February 22. A motion for a grant of £40,000 to pay his debts was unanimously carried in the Commons. Earlier (1801), his friends had raised £12,000 in order to relieve him from embarrassment. Careless to a fault about money and engrossed with public affairs, he had allowed his large official income to be squandered by irresponsible servants and tradesmen.

Private life and character

Though eloquent and forceful in Parliament and Cabinet, Pitt made no impact in society and altogether lacked the common touch. He was always notably withdrawn. He never married. He had few friends. Even members of the government complained of his inaccessibility. In 1801 his resignation from office caused extraordinarily little sensation; a contemporary wrote that “nobody speaks of him; no addresses, no subscriptions, no stir of any kind any where.” Long before his death, bodily infirmities, increased by his addiction to port, curtailed his working day.

Pitt’s experience was remarkably limited. He never set foot in Scotland or Ireland; the greater part even of England was unknown to him. He was once in France—for a few weeks. He never came into touch with men of letters or original thinkers; in his official patronage he neglected literature, science, and the arts. He was long overconfident of success in every cause he espoused; in the end only the weight of ill health and Napoleon’s great victories of 1805 began to shatter his optimism. Although at first connected with the movement for parliamentary reform, he made no attempts to reintroduce the issue after the failure of his bill in 1785. He made no effort to deal with the social problems caused by the Industrial Revolution; and in all his long years of office, nothing was done to reform the barbarous criminal law, the harsh game laws, prison administration, and local government. Nevertheless, by reason of his superb debating powers he dominated the House of Commons, even in that age of notable oratory. His conduct in Parliament had a mixture of prudence, firmness, and transcendent ability never before seen and hardly ever again surpassed.

Historical importance

The constitutional significance of Pitt’s career has often been misunderstood. He was not a prime minister of the modern type. At no time was he the leader of a well-organized, coherent party commanding a majority of the House of Commons, which itself owed its existence to the will of the electorate. He was not at all the choice of the country; he was the nominee of the King, and he retained office only as long as he retained the King’s confidence. He had to resign in 1801 because his Irish policy was not acceptable to George III. Even though the inadequacy as a wartime prime minister of his successor made Pitt’s return to office almost inevitable three years later, Pitt did not return on his own terms but on the King’s. He was more dependent on the King’s favour than he was on the support of the House of Commons. His most serious crisis came in the winter of 1788–89, when, during George III’s madness, Pitt lost the support of the crown. Had the dissolute Prince of Wales, who favoured the opposition, become regent, Pitt would certainly have been dismissed. Without the support of the crown, neither he nor anyone else could remain long in office. Moreover, there were obvious limitations to his absolute authority in the Cabinet, where various colleagues opposed him on all the great questions of the day. And, finally, Pitt had to deal with a sovereign of narrow intellect and with intense and irrational prejudices—though, indeed, these were shared by a great many of George III’s subjects.

Although Pitt’s supremacy in the Cabinet has often been exaggerated, the necessity for a prime minster who would supervise and coordinate the work of the various departments and possess the chief confidence of the king was never again questioned after his ministries. Pitt’s achievement of this status, while depending upon his forcefulness of character, was only made possible by his long tenure of office. His total of 19 years in power exceeded by almost 7 years the tenure of office, earlier in the 18th century, of Sir Robert Walpole, often regarded as “the first” British prime minister, and that of Lord North, nearer Pitt’s own time.

It is sometimes claimed that Pitt emerged as the leader of a new Tory Party. Certainly, as a minister who accepted the royal prerogative, he represented the traditions of the Tory, or Court, Party, as distinct from those of the Whigs, who sought to dictate to the crown the choice of its servants; but he was far from being a great party leader commanding the votes of a majority in the House of Commons. He had a personal following of little more than 50. In spite of persistent efforts, great speeches, and the support of powerful and eloquent members, he failed to pass a slave trade abolition bill, a parliamentary reform bill, and Catholic relief bills.